


Mad, Impossible Things

by khallucifer



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/F, First Kiss, Fluff and Angst, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, LMAO, and Yaz saves her, both Yaz and the Doctor get absolutely soaking wet, ive never written anything this short before, rated teen for the language but tell me if it needs to be mature or anything, tbh i dont know how to tag this, the doctor almost drowns, though technically she doesn't need to
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-26
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-08-29 23:17:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16753348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/khallucifer/pseuds/khallucifer
Summary: Yaz doesn’t even think. After the water has settled and there’s still no sign of the Doctor, she dives into the murky depths.She dives with the same single-minded determination that had possessed her only once before. She recalls it now, as she slipped into that unfathomable calm: the shooting range; the smell of gunsmoke; the mufflers squeezing her head like a vice. The look of paternal, gentle condescension on her superior officer’s face as he’d casually leaned against the wall, a few metres away, arms crossed, absolutely certain she’d fail this. The muted rage that heated her to beyond boiling point when she’d first walked out into the range, as she heard her peers sniggering behind her, no doubt exchanging cruel japes and veiled insults after she’d turned her back on them.She’d had no choice but to nail every shot.She can not afford to do any less than that now.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first fic for this pairing, so please be kind :)

Yaz doesn’t even think. After the water has settled and there’s still no sign of the Doctor, she dives into the murky depths.

She dives with the same single-minded determination that had possessed her only once before. She recalls it now, as she slipped into that unfathomable calm: the shooting range; the smell of gunsmoke; the mufflers squeezing her head like a vice. The look of paternal, gentle condescension on her superior officer’s face as he’d casually leaned against the wall, a few metres away, arms crossed, absolutely certain she’d fail this. The muted rage that heated her to beyond boiling point when she’d first walked out into the range, as she heard her peers sniggering behind her, no doubt exchanging cruel japes and veiled insults after she’d turned her back on them.

She’d had no choice but to nail every shot.

She can not afford to do any less than that now.

Not when it is the Doctor’s life at stake. _Her_ Doctor. Her ‘my-one-rule-is-never-ever-interfere-and-I-break-it-as-often-as-I-can’ Doctor.

Her Doctor who may very well be drowning, if she hasn’t already, and nobody else is doing anything in the way of _helping_ , so she doesn’t even pause to strip off her jacket before she plunges into the frigid lake and powers through the water like a seal; her clothes should have weighed her down, her pockets just rocks on her person trying to drag her into the depths, but she has always been a keen swimmer and this time it isn’t only her life that depends on getting it right.

It is the Doctor’s, too.

The Doctor who has saved her life so many times she’s lost count; who’s shown her such incredible, unbelievable things that she couldn’t even dream of and yet—there they were, right in front of her, so close that she can touch them and so real that she can feel them, and these magical, impossible things would be enough all by themselves, but—

But it’s the Doctor too. The Doctor who stands by and grins stupidly with her entire face, not just her mouth. Her eyes light up like Bonfire Night and her nose scrunches, just a little, and her grin is so wide, so all-encompassing, that sometimes Yaz feels like she could get lost in it.

She can’t lose all of that. Not yet.

And also, it isn’t just all of the magical, impossible things that the Doctor can show her—it’s those nights when Yaz can’t sleep, and Ryan and Graham have already retreated to their own beds, and she’s just sitting with her legs hanging out the TARDIS doors into the vast endlessness of space, contemplating everything she’s ever done wrong—and then a warm body is sitting next to her, pressing into her, and there’s a blanket over their shoulders, and the Doctor has pushed a hot cup of tea—brewed exactly how Yaz likes it—into her hands, and she thinks to herself, _this is perfection. This is forever_.

But it _won’t_ be forever. Not unless Yaz does this.

It feels like a lifetime before her grasping fingers hit sodden clothes and a solid body, and the water is so cold it is nearly impossible to keep her eyes open enough to peer through the bleary depths, and she’s pretty sure that something has wrapped itself around her ankle and a tiny, tiny part of her is yelling at her to give up because she’s running out of air and she’s running out of strength and she’s running out of will to not just take a deep breath and consign herself to the depths, but then through the disgusting green-blue-grey of the water Yaz is sure she can just make out the blonde halo of hair she has never had particularly strong feelings about—but now she just wants to cradle the head that it belongs to and whisper _everything’s going to be okay._

She is hit with the sudden longing to run her fingers through that hair and see if it is just as silky as it looks. She wants to braid it into a messy crown, that’s half coming out because the hair isn’t quite long enough, and the Doctor will laugh and be grateful anyway and smile at Yaz with that brilliant, dazzling smile that has been through _so much_ and still shines brighter than any star in the sky—

But enough of that. The Doctor isn’t moving. Yaz isn’t sure she is even still _alive_.

She sends a quick prayer of thanks to her God that she hadn’t, in her haste, remembered to fling off the jacket out of some desire to protect it from the water, because otherwise she has no idea how she’d pick the lock to the chains that bind the Doctor to that fucking tree.

She teased the sliver of metal out from the carefully-sewn in pouch in her sleeve—look, you never knew when you’d need a lockpick and/or shank, and since she’d begun travelling with the Doctor, its presence was even more comforting.

Her lungs are burning, and her head is starting to pound a lot more viciously than she’d necessarily like, and coloured spots have appeared in the corners of her vision by the time she can finally pull the Doctor free of those chains and away from the tree altogether.

It is with a monumental effort that Yaz takes that first stroke towards the surface, dragging the Doctor’s unresponsive body behind her. She is sure that she is going to die. Nobody can survive this long without air—it’s just not possible. She’s going to drown here, and Ryan and Graham will be left behind with no way home, and everything she has done is going to be behind because she’s too _weak_ to do this—

And then she breaches the surface and takes a massive, massive gulp of air.

That first breath of air tastes of victory. Golden, shining light and a chorus of a thousand angels singing and she’s so, so alive.

The next tastes of fear. A putrid, foul-tasting fear that wraps itself around her throat and _squeezes_ , and it’s not fair, because she’s just survived drowning and saved the Doctor from drowning too, and now she’s going to choke to death on the fear that has forced its way down her throat and caused her lungs to _burn_.

Because she forgot about the witch-hunters themselves, standing to attention on the beach like an army of demons that allowed her to fight through all of hell only to block her escape at the very last hurdle.

The assembled audience is watching her with hatred in their eyes and curses on their tongues, ripping from their throats like the snarls of a starving pack of wild beasts. She froze; evidently, she can’t strike out immediately for the shore, because she’d only be delivering her Doctor into the hands of those monsters, but she has run entirely out of options.

She considers trying to strike out for the other shore, but she’s so, so tired, and the thinks she’d rather just buy some time before the both of them are hanged by reaching the shore where the rabid mob is waiting to gobble them up than have to swim all the way across the almost-lake with a water-heavy Doctor in her arms.

The tension drags out. The women seemed to be glaring at her the hardest, which is a little strange considering they should probably be all on the same side—but then, pointing the finger at somebody else means it is pointing away from you, so Yaz can kind of understand that, a bit. They’re just looking out for themselves and their families. The men seem more jovial, if anything; they’re watching her like hounds watch a foxhole, knowing that she’ll either come to them and be ripped to pieces, or she’ll die where she is.

Neither option is particularly agreeable.

Graham and Ryan are a little way away, watching the stand-off in mute horror, fear and anger causing their jaws to clench into a stony silence between them and their eyes to turn as hard and as bright as burning coals. There is fire in their hearts, she thinks to herself, which is a strange thing to think since it is rather more poetic than her usual thoughts and also she has never described anybody as having _fire in their hearts_ , let alone Graham and Ryan. Of course, she has always known, distantly, that both of them are brave, but she wouldn’t ever have gone so far as to say they have _fire in their hearts_.

Maybe the Doctor’s drama and theatrics has begun to rub off on her.

She’s had worse thoughts, admittedly, but she’d never hear the end of it if she were to mention one _word_ of it to either Graham or Ryan, so she vows to herself then and there to never mention that she’s begun to admire their courage and strength with the same theatricality as the Doctor.

Something cold and strangely slimy brushes against her leg again, almost a caress—a solemn vow from the depths of this lake that they will consume her whole and spit out nothing but her bones if she does not find an escape route soon.

Treading water has never seemed like such a _fucking_ chore. Yaz has always rather enjoyed swimming, but at this particular point in time if she ever jumped into a swimming pool again it would be too soon. She’s growing desperate, and afraid, and her strength is being sapped from her as she desperately wracks her brains.

This cannot last much longer.

The shouting is still loud, their cries of fury and accusations of _witch, witch, she’s a witch—she’ll burn at the stake! She’ll be hanged! She’ll be…_ as coarse and unforgiving against her ears as they can possibly be, but then she locks eyes with King James.

There is a moment, sometimes, when you lock eyes with somebody whom you have never met, when the entirety of human communication is singled down to that single point in time and somehow, impossibly, you and that person are linked inextricably and inexplicably in whatever is happening. When you step into a train and there’s a madman sitting in full Victorian get-up, seemingly oblivious to the odd looks he is getting, and you make eye contact with the person standing across from you—and right then, right there, you and that person know everything about each other you could ever need to know and have communicated an entire conversation in that single glance. You are united. You are allies.

And then you look away, and the moment breaks, because when you look back it is never quite the same. But for that single, shining moment, you are connected in a way that you simply cannot connect at any other time.

The flash of white-hot understanding courses through Yaz right then and she and King James are linked so intrinsically and so inescapably that it almost knocks the breath from her. Almost, because if she lost her breath then she’d sink and die, but it’s the thought that counts.

 _Please, I need your help_ , she begins.

 _She’s a witch_ , he responds, eyes flicking to the Doctor just for a split second.

 _She’s not. I promise,_ Yaz is exhausted.

There must be something in her expression to convince him, because there is a new resolve there that she isn’t sure she has seen on _anybody’s_ face before—this must be the face of a King, she decides, capitalising it in her mind because how else is it meant to carry the weight the title brings?

His gaze slides again to the woman Yaz holds in her arms, and his brows lift—and it’s an unnameable emotion, but she understands it nonetheless because his lips begin to move and she’s so _fucking_ relieved she could have collapsed with the strength of it, but she can’t, because drowning.

The cries begin to die down.

What is he saying? She can’t hear. He is pointing at them, and the men are nodding, though the women still look furious— _yeah, fuck you too_ , no matter how much Yaz can understand the sentiment _—_ and then some of what they are saying drift over to her.

 _Dead_. _The woman drowned. She must be innocent_.

Holy fuck— _your innocence is proven only when you drowned_ , and Yaz has always considered that a sneaky bit of bullshit since you can’t win either way, and she’s never been appreciative of no-win scenarios, but just this once she’s willing to make an exception since the alternative is dying for real, and that wasn’t on her agenda when she woke up this morning and she certainly is not ready to die just yet.

But she has to be certain.

She meets King James’ eyes again, and this time there is no flash of understanding, no heat of fundamental human connection, but she knows what he means all the same when he nods at her, just once, then turns and begins to walk away. His cohort—mostly the men, and only one or two women, the others electing instead to stay and watch—follow him.

Graham and Ryan are waiting for her; Yaz doesn’t think she could have gotten both herself and the Doctor back onto dry land if they hadn’t been there to drag her upwards through the mud. She is sure that she has never been this exhausted in her entire _life_.

She flops into the mud, chest heaving, not caring that she’s soaked through and covered in grime and sweat and _caked in mud_ , heaving in great gasps of air. Thankfully she’s not coughed up any water.

“Is she dead?” If his voice hadn’t been coloured with such genuine fear, Yaz would have laughed at Ryan for asking a question with such a stupidly obvious answer.

It is Graham who answered, though. “She doesn’t have to be.” In her present state, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to Yaz, who has only just convinced herself that she didn’t die horribly and is, in fact, very much alive, and has begun to tentatively test her faculties to make sure she’s not lost a limb or something in some horrible accident she didn’t notice. The calm that had overtaken her while she was dragging the Doctor back to shore has been completely overshadowed by a deep-seated, all-consuming fear, and she has to work just to breathe in enough air that she won’t pass out.

It strikes her, when she sits up, how calm Graham looks, despite the fear and anxiety that is written across his face, plain as day. He crawls through the mud over to the Doctor’s prone body, and Yaz has to force herself to look at the Doctor— _her_ Doctor, looking very much dead and covered in muck herself. Her face has a pale tint to it that cries of death, though Yaz isn’t sure that she’s not just imagining it.

“We just—we just do CPR, yeah?” He hovers, unsure, all of his purposefulness from before apparently drained away now that he’s looking at the Doctor properly, poised to begin compressions with his hand half-clasped over her chest. “Grace showed me how, but I haven’t—I’ve never done it on a real person before.” Yaz is struck by how frightened Graham sounds.

She examines her own state, clinically. She’s not afraid—the constant swinging between states is giving her whiplash. It’s exhausting. The fear that had begun to consume her when she first flopped onto the ground has been drained away now that she’s faced with the reality that the Doctor might not come back, her Doctor, the Doctor who has taken her on all of these brilliant, mad, incredible adventures, and now she’s just—

Calm.

She’s utterly, utterly calm. More calm than she’s even been in her life, probably.

She drags herself out of the Yaz-shaped imprint she has made in the sucking mud and crawls over to the Doctor, knocking Graham’s hands out of the way and summoning the last dregs of her strength to begin compressions herself.

When she did this before, she managed to keep a beat in her head, but now it’s just herself and the sound of Graham and Ryan’s panicked breathing and the crush of the Doctor’s ribs beneath her hands and the blood that is rushing curiously loudly in her ears.

She locks lips with the Doctor, pinches her nose shut, and breathes, once, twice, and then back to the compressions, pumping the Doctor’s heart because _somebody has to_ , somebody has to save this brilliant, utterly brilliant madwoman who charmed all of them with her magic box and magic adventures, and Yaz thinks that if she doesn’t do this, doesn’t save her, she might as well stay here anyway because there isn’t anything better at home, and then—

And then she’s finished the thirty compressions, and she is so, so _tired_ , and then—

And then she moves to give more breaths.

Freezes.

Because the Doctor; the brilliant, insane, incredible, magical Doctor—

_Her Doctor—_

Has her eyes open wide and is grinning at Yaz with the kind of grin that makes your stomach do funny flip-flops, and she’s _so, so alive._

Yaz is fairly certain that her heart stops dead in her chest. She yelps and flails backwards, spectacularly undignified, and distantly she hears Graham and Ryan cursing, and _what in the name of fuck—_

The Doctor is laughing. Granted, she’s also coughing up a veritable lake of water, spluttering and choking and _fucking laughing_.

“Yaz—something you should—should know that—” the Doctor managed to splutter out about half of a garbled sentence before she is overcome with those great wracking coughs again, and by the time she recovers enough to continue it, Yaz, Graham, and Ryan have calmed somewhat and have gone from traumatised shock to a muted and yet somehow-still-piercing glare.

The Doctor grins, unrepentant.

“I’ve got two hearts, Yaz. You gotta—alternate. Which heart you’re beating.” Yaz has heard enough wild shit in her days as a police officer to know when she’s being had, except this time doesn’t feel like one of those times. She accepts the two hearts thing. She’s seen weirder, in her time in the TARDIS, so she takes this information and files it away as “weird shit I wish I didn’t know about the Doctor,” and that’s that.

“Also, I can go for a lot longer with water in my lungs that a human can. I was never in danger of dying.” The Doctor finishes slowly, almost softly, as if soothing her, and Yaz feels something akin to discomfort—some emotion she doesn’t really recognise, though she has an inkling as to what it might be and she is quite frankly horrified at herself for not recognising it sooner because she’s almost certain that she has experienced this before—it is as though she is pinned under the Doctor’s gaze.

The Doctor grins at her, almost tentatively. Yaz just looks back at her, too shocked about—well, everything—to say anything clever, or funny, to break the tension.

And then she laughs. It’s more of a surprised bark, to be honest, but it’s also relieved, and then the rest of them begin to join in, and _then_ they’re just a bunch of idiots laughing somewhat hysterically in the mud, and all of them are so, so alive.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unsurprisingly, I decided there needed to be another chapter in this, because brevity has never been my strong suit and also i love these two disaster gays

Chapter 2

Yaz has never considered how absolutely, deafeningly, _silent_ space is. She feels as though the soft, golden-pink glow of the nebular they are orbiting should be accompanied by an equally-soft noise, like rainfall outside your window, or the sounds of a far-off ocean shore.

Instead, the nebula glares back at her, surrounded by this all-consuming _void_ of noise and she has to suppress a shiver. She has visited planets and spoke with creatures the likes of which could only be found in a bad sci-fi film from the seventies, and yet—and yet nothing has seemed so _alien_ as this incredible sight and its incredible silence.

She glares at the nebula, lost in thought.

“What’s that look for, then?” The Doctor’s sudden arrival jolts Yaz out of her reverie, causing her to jolt her cup of tea in turn—several drops splash out and fall. From where she’s sitting, with her legs hanging out of the TARDIS over the vast endlessness of space, she watches the drops fall and fall.

“They might fall forever,” the Doctor remarks sagely, settling herself down beside Yasmin. There isn’t much space in the doorway to begin with, and with Yaz there’s even less room, but the Doctor squeezes herself into the tight space and then they’re comfortable sitting pressed up against one another. Yaz swallows.

The Doctor takes a sip from her own mug, which is steaming, because of course it is, Yaz thinks venomously. Of course the _Doctor_ gets boiling-hot mugs of tea. Yaz can never get the finnicky TARDIS kettle to make her anything more than almost-hot-but-it-might-just-be-wishful-thinking.

“Forever?” she asks then, because the Doctor is looking at her now and she feels as though she needs to reply.

The Doctor nods. “No gravity in space, nothing to slow their fall. They’ll just go and go and go.” She pauses, then, taking another sip of her tea through a wince that Yaz possibly wasn’t meant to notice, but she does. “Well, maybe they’ll get drawn in by the gravity of some sun, or planet, or nebula. They might disperse, gradually, as well, because there is _some_ gravity in space, because every single thing has gravity and bits of it is just flying around. Sort of. But they might freeze before that, or—well, maybe _forever_ isn’t quite right, but they might go for a long time before something happens.”

Yaz smiles at her mug as the Doctor rambles on. After her almost-half-kind of revelations about herself from the past few days, and everything that has happened in between, it’s nice to have a bit of—well. She’d been about to think _normal,_ but nothing about anything involving the Doctor is ever normal, but she supposes it’s normal for her, now.

“Yaz? Are you alright? You’re being a bit… spaced out,” and oh, isn’t Yaz glad the Doctor hadn’t said _weird_. She sounds almost concerned, and it takes a moment for Yaz to remember they’d been having a conversation. Admittedly, it had been about small drops of tea falling through space, but whatever the Doctor said still warranted a reply.

“Yeah! I’m—I’m fine. Just a bit… tired, I suppose.” She smiles encouragingly at the Doctor, who seems unconvinced. “Are _you_ okay?”

The Doctor laughs, then. “Of course, I’m okay, I’m _always_ okay. I’m the king of okay. Or the queen, now, I suppose,” she finishes wistfully, and Yaz has the sudden thought that this is something the Doctor rarely gets asked. _Is she remembering somebody who asked her this before?_ “It’s you guys I worry about,” she suddenly continues, turning to fix her intense eyes on Yasmin, who flails silently under her gaze, something hot beginning to churn in her stomach.

The allow the following moment to transpire in silence as they both take long draughts from their respective mugs, Yaz finishing hers.

“It’s just—” the Doctor goes to continue whatever thought she may have had, then suddenly cuts herself off, and Yaz looks up at her again, setting her now-empty mug on the floor behind her, something akin to alarm beginning to course through her. “It’s—ah. Never mind. It’s nothing.” She smiles, then, and Yaz doesn’t know what else to do so she smiles back, feeling a little awkward. Thankfully, the moment is broken by Graham’s arrival.

“Doctor! Ryan’s had—well, he had a bit of a row with your kettle and now it’s refusing to boil anything.” He sounds rather helpless, actually, and Yaz snorts to herself. At least she’s not the _only_ one who has trouble with the Doctor’s bloody recalcitrant kitchenware.

The Doctor jumps up, thankfully managing to avoid the empty mugs that were sitting behind the two of them, emitting a small squeak that Yaz doesn’t think Graham heard and just makes her heart _melt_.

“Sorry about that—kettle’s a bit sensitive,” she explains, as though that is supposed to make any sort of sense. She dashes across the console room rather faster than Yaz thinks a bitchy kettle calls for, although she supposes the Doctor is always dashing about and saying things that must seem obvious to her but sound insane to anybody else. Yaz has no idea how she’s always so full of energy.

The Doctor has flown past Graham and down the corridor by the time Yaz has stood and stretched. Graham offers her a smile.

“You two looked… cosy,” he winks at her, and she scowls in response before bending to collect the mugs that lie empty and forlorn at her feet.

“Shut up.”

“I’m just saying—you two would make—”

“I’m going to stop you right there, and then we’re gonna pretend we never had this conversation, _Graham_ ,” she uses her best police-officer voice, making and keeping eye contact and staring him down. He just grins back at her. She scowls again, before pushing past him, purposefully jostling his shoulder and eliciting a defensive _“hey!”_.

She shakes her head, and follows down where the Doctor disappears so she can dispose of the mugs and also probably save Ryan from a psychotic kettle.

~~

It’s much later, and Yaz isn’t lying in bed so much as sitting against the headboard, covers pulled up around her, thoughts racing through her mind faster than she can really process them.

So… she might be just a little bit gay.

Just a little, though, because she can’t say she’s ever had a crush on a girl before, except—

Except she doesn’t really have a word _other_ than that for what she feels for the Doctor _now_. Why does it have to be so complicated?

She fumbles with her phone absentmindedly. Switching it on; off; on; off. The Doctor has assured her it can make texts and calls to her family and friends, no matter where she is in the universe—or _when_ she is—though it’s still a little strange to be texting people and seeing a different time or date written next to them. She doesn’t know how the TARDIS, or the technology in her phone, decides _when_ she is texting—and neither does the Doctor, apparently, but Yaz suspects she has an inkling and simply can’t explain it.

Her mind returns to _why_ she is holding her phone. She’s had a couple of life-altering realisations over the past few days: she’s gay (apparently); she’s gay for the _Doctor_ ; she doesn’t know yet if she’s gay _specifically_ for the Doctor. It’s not like she can just google this.

So: which one of her friends can she ask?

She’s never had a situation like this where her friend is more knowledgeable than the internet. Which friend does she ask? How does she even _begin_ to ask?

_“Er, hey, it’s Yaz. I know you gave me your number and I never texted it but now I’m having a big gay freakout and you’re one of my only gay friends so do you think you could help me out?”_

Possibly wouldn’t go over well.

Or… she could text her sister—though her sister has been particularly helpful in a crisis, so maybe not the greatest source of information.

Maybe she could text her mum. But then, she doesn’t really want to put all of this on her mum when she hasn’t even figured it out for herself yet.

Maybe there’s a phone number she can ring. Is that a thing? Some sort of… LGBT helpline?

Is she just thinking too much into this?

She sighs, tosses the phone onto her nightstand, and slides down under her covers with a scowl on her face.

~~

The Doctor has always loved her library. It’s just—so calm. Clean. Peaceful. Shelves upon shelves with all the knowledge of the universe. Stories and legends and science from her own people, found nowhere but here. A wealth of information about species and planets—some of it true, some of it mere myths and legends—spanning right across the cosmos. She knew most of it; information she’d gathered once because she’d found it interesting, or useful, or learned it in an emergency and went back to consolidate it later on.

Most of it has fallen out of her head by now, but she knows exactly where she can find it if she thinks she ever needs it again.

He library is her sanctuary. Her private place. It’s where she knows she can go to wallow in her misery, celebrate her friends’ lives when they’re gone and grieve their passing. Oftentimes, it’s where she feels closest to the TARDIS (aside from in the console room, that it); sometimes, she’ll be wandering her shelves and she’ll find a book that she _knows_ she didn’t put there but seems interesting all the same.

Her companions have never really found their way down here. It was always _her_ place. But—

It’s not like her companions have ever been _barred_ from coming down here; they’ve always been allowed.

So, she can’t really explain why her heart jolts, just a little, when she turns a corner and finds two of her  sitting on bean bags that she can’t remember ever acquiring. Ryan sees her first.

“Doctor!” at this, Yaz looks around too, and her smile is so warm and soft that the Doctor’s stomach does another flip, rather more insistently this time. She can’t help but grin back.

“What are you guys doing down here?”

“Got tired of arguing with kettles. Figured I’d look for entertainment that doesn’t run on electricity. This place is _huge_ , Doctor—how long have you been collecting books?” Ryan seems… rather more awed by the library than the Doctor has felt about her library for an awfully long time; she really should appreciate it more.

It reminds her how very young her companions are. How wide-eyed. How _young_.

“Coupla centuries; it used to be only Time Lord stuff, but then I got bored of just reading about my own people and figured a bit more variety couldn’t hurt.” She swallows the old sadness; Yaz and Ryan don’t need to be hearing about the veritable extinction of her species.

“Well, it’s amazing in here. You have _everything_ —I’ve been reading about Earth’s history—or our future, I guess. Does all of this stuff really happen?” Yaz waves the book, though the Doctor can’t immediately identify which book it is. She hopes it’s not written about the twenty-first century; she doesn’t want Yaz trying to convince her to change history, or something.

“Hey! Spoilers! Though, it probably does happen. Most of it. Sometimes it changes, and the words in the books change as well—although most of the time that’s my fault, I have to admit.” She gives them an embarrassed smile. “Sorry. Can’t help myself meddling.”

Yaz grins at her again, and the Doctor thinks she would give an awful lot of things to be able to see that smile every day.

“I don’t mind the spoilers. Besides, I’m not reading anything that’s going to happen in _my_ lifetime. All of this stuff… at the moment, everybody’s worried that the worlds going to end, because of pollution and global warming or Word War Three—but it doesn’t, does it? We just… keep going.” Yaz’ voice has turned to something reverential, and it’s a good thing that she’s not looking at the Doctor anymore because she’s fairly certain that her face is giving away way too much.

Yaz continues, because apparently she likes to torture the Doctor. “It’s amazing. Everything we’ve been through—World War One, World War Two, Vietnam, everything—it’s like, we all imagine that we’re never going to learn, and that things will just get worse and worse until someday some idiot with a big red button will blow us all to smithereens, but… they don’t. The world keeps turning, and we just—we keep _growing_.” She looks up, then, and meets the Doctor’s eyes, and she has to work very hard to fix her face into something that won’t give away all of the affection she’s harbouring for the human.

Maybe she does it wrong, though, because Yaz’ face twists into something the Doctor can’t quite read and she looks quickly back down at her book, cheeks tinging slightly darker. It’s cute, but the Doctor doesn’t like to think that she—that she makes Yaz _uncomfortable_ , or something.

“I’ll just—um, I’ll just go put this back, then,” Yaz mutters quietly, before abruptly standing up from the bean bag with much more grace than anybody should be able to get out of a bean bag with,

“Nah, mate, she’s just—erm. Well. Worried about her—her mum, I guess.”

 “Why? Is something wrong with Yaz’ mum?” the thought worries her more than she’d thought it would. She’d never been this worried about Jackie.

“No. No. So—um, I saw your face when you were looking at her,” she suspects Ryan might be deflecting her, a bit, but she chooses to ignore this. He continutes. “You really like her, don’t you?”

And this… isn’t what she expected him to say, and so she really wasn’t ready to immediately wipe the expression off of her face before he sees it, and so whatever it is that he reads is rather more than she intended to let on.

Which, to be fair, wouldn’t be as much of a problem if she _knew what it was_ that he had seen, but she can’t even identify the emotion that tightens her gut for _herself_ —which only makes the grin that lights up Ryan’s face even more alarming.

“Well—I, er, I mean—”

“Doctor, it’s okay. Just… be careful. Yaz is—she’s always been the outsider. Don’t… don’t break her heart.” She nods, though she doesn’t really understand what he means by that, (well, she knows what he’s _saying,_ but she doesn’t particularly think it applies to her) and Ryan nods back at her, still grinning.

Well.

She smiles, then; a smile that she had used dozens, if not hundreds, of times—her everything-is-going-to-be-okay-because-I-know-what-I’m-doing smile—and says something to him that she doesn’t quite hear but she supposes goes along the lines of “well I’m just going to go now, see you in a bit”, and then she turns and leaves, mind reeling.

~~

It doesn’t take long for the Doctor to drag them into another _situation._

“Rajkolrreh!” the Doctor exclaims it with such a beatific expression that Yaz almost feels bad for pointing out that none of them know what or where that is.

The Doctor just smiles, and shakes her head. “ _Gorgeous_ planet—simply stunning. Three suns! Kind of like—imagine a tropical climate, except it’s not too hot and there aren’t any mosquitoes. Also, good cocktails,” she adds, and if Yaz wasn’t convinced before then she certainly is now.

“Space cocktails? Count me in,” Ryan, apparently, also needed little convincing, and he and Yaz share a grin.

Graham frowns. “These cocktails aren’t gonna kill us, are they? Because I’m not going to another planet where I’m promised cocktails and then not get them.”

The Doctor sighs exasperatedly. “Of _course_ , Graham, you’ll be able to have the cocktails. When have I ever promised you cocktails that turn out to be poisonous to humans?”

“Like, at least three—”

“Right!” The Doctor cuts Graham off unashamedly. “Rajkolrreh it is.”

The TARDIS shudders around them, and its familiar wheezing and groaning silences anything further Graham might have said, and the Doctor laughs excitedly like she always does, and Yaz grins at her joy.

~~

The planet is absolutely, incredibly stunning. The grass is a burnt pink, the dirt below a dark hue of orange; the fields stretching out around the TARDIS filled with wildflowers of every hue of the rainbow peeking out between pink stalks of grass.

“Oh, Grace would have _loved_ this,” Graham mutters to himself as soon as they exit, and Yaz doesn’t even feel the familiar pang of sadness as she looks over the view. The Doctor closes the door behind them with a flourish.

“Right then! There’s a little farm a few minutes walk from here; we should be able to get some horses there, and then we can make our way to the city. You guys are gonna _love_ it. It—” Yaz tunes the Doctor’s ramblings out—something she’s gotten rather used to, recently, instead taking in the scenery, committing it to memory. One thing she’s noticed about the Doctor is that she never really returns to the same place once she’s already visited it.

The horses are… not precisely what she recognises as horses, but they’re friendly enough, and don’t seem to mind that the only one of them who has any experience with riding is the Doctor. They set off down the burnt-orange, dirt track, the horses’ hooves clopping beneath them.

The city is unlike anything Yaz has ever seen. They leave the horses tied to a post outside something the Doctor describes as a “dolru”—apparently a sort of livery yard, crossed with a carpark. Yaz doesn’t dispute this.

The buildings are made out of some sort of wood that Yaz has never seen before—compared to the beauty of the rest of the world, the wooden planks are a dull grey-brown that look nothing like the trunks the wood is undoubtedly harvested from.

The trees themselves are hundreds of feet tall; the Doctor explains that one only gets chopped down every decade or so, when the increase in population calls for more buildings to be built and more land to be cleared. “They take good care of their world, here,” she smiles at her humans.

The natives are all of them friendly—they look nothing like humans, but they make no mention of the Doctor’s companions’ appearances, and they offer food and tours and after the first sun sets they offer some of the most delicious cocktails Yaz has ever had.

Of course, it doesn’t take long for the second sun to then set, and everything immediately goes to shit—because of course it does.

The third sun never sets below the horizon, the natives explain. When the other two suns have gone down, it bathes the planet in a soft blue light. Beautiful, they claim.

Of course, they miss out the part where this blue light apparently causes all of the fauna native to the planet to turn into _psychotic murderers_.

The Doctor claims this shouldn’t happen, that this has never happened on any of her past visits, and that something is absolutely, horrifyingly wrong.

“That’s becoming something of a trend,” Yaz remarks rather casually, despite the fact that they were presently sprinting for their lives.

Of course, the Doctor’s particular brand of making things up as she goes along goes just as brilliantly as it always does. Her blend of science and science that’s apparently not-quite-magic-except-it-one-hundred-percent-is works wonders to reverse whatever-the-hell-it-is that made the fauna on the planet ravenous with hunger for violent deaths—something to do with photosynthesis, and then because the people were eating the plants it transferred through them, but also Yaz thinks the Doctor may have just been dumbing it down for them—and save the people of Rajkolrreh.

That morning, while they’re making their way back to the TARDIS having returned their no-longer-murderous-horses back to the farm they borrowed them from, the Doctor mentions that… there’s something else.

Of course there’s something else.

There is _always_ something else.

That third sun, the Doctor explains to them, shouldn’t be blue. It ought to be on the complete other end of the spectrum of colour, actually, and if there is something that has sickened it then they need to fix it and make it better. Because, she continues over Ryan and Graham’s protests, if the sun sickened once before then what’s to say it can’t sicken again? And then everything she did will simply be undone.

“Alright then,” Graham is the last to concede, “what do you want us to do?”

“Oh, I’m going to fly the TARDIS into the sun and hope we don’t burn to a crisp.”

“…right.”

None of them dispute this, though. Not one. They all look at the Doctor with trust emblazoned across their faces, putting their lives into her hands, never once doubting that she might fail to look after them.

She does not disappoint.

The TARDIS fights the Doctor; it always does, in some way or another, though mostly they’re small rebellions. Inconsequential. Just little reminders that it isn’t just a ship, it’s alive, and sentient, and appreciates some affection every now and again.

It succumbs to her will, in the end—eventually, it always does. Though it isn’t pretty. The paint on the exterior of the TARDIS has begun cracking under the heat and the temperature of the console room increases to just short of unbearable—the Doctor estimates it must be about twelve thousand degrees outside, if it’s managing to affect the TARDIS in such a manner.

Then she flings open the doors.

The blast of heat feels like a solid punch to the face; Graham and Ryan are both knocked off their feet, but Yaz manages to hold her ground and the Doctor leans _into_ the wave. In her hand she’s holding a small vial of blue… oil, it seems, though when she leans out of the door to tip it out it clings to the bottle, as though trying to avoid coming into contact with that sun at all costs. She shakes it impatiently. Eventually, the glass cracks, though whether that is due to the Doctor’s grasp or the heat outside is unclear.

The liquid falls. It falls, and falls, and suddenly, the sun flares blue—the deepest blue Yasmin has ever seen, and she gasps at the beauty of it, and then—

And then the sun melts into green, and then yellow, and then a brilliant orange, and then a deep, bloody crimson, and even the Doctor is thrown back in the ensuing blast of heat and the TARDIS doors slam shut and then its whirring and groaning and trembling and they’re _flying_ —

And then they’ve landed, and they’re all lying on their backs and gasping great breaths of air and the temperature drops so suddenly that tears drip slowly down their faces.

They _won_.

Yaz lifts her head; the Doctor is already up, running a soothing hand across her console and murmuring quiet words to the machinery. Ryan and Graham are still lying on the ground—probably in shock.

The Doctor notices her, then. She comes over.

She holds out her hand, and there is something in her face that makes Yaz’ stomach flutter with—with the crush, she thinks, but then the lights are flickering and highlight the Doctor’s cheekbones and her hair is plastered to her face with sweat and the grin still etched across her face speaks volumes to her sheer _joy_ at the pure madness that is her life.

So Yasmin takes her hand, because it’s the only thing she can do, and in the rush of adrenaline and hormones and energy she takes the Doctor’s face in her hands and she kisses her soundly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please tell me what you thought! I definitely didn't edit this as much as I would have liked and I'm also fairly certain I've fucked up my tenses and I don't know how much I like the last part but here u guys go :)


	3. Chapter 3

And the Doctor _kisses her back_.

It is everything Yaz could possibly have dreamed of, and more.

“Is this _really the time?_ ” Graham yells from somewhere behind them, and the TARDIS is lurching horribly and its engines sound like they’re _screaming_ , but all Yaz can focus on is the Doctor’s hands tugging forcefully on her hair and okay, maybe this woman is hundreds—if not thousands—of years old, and has lived hundreds of different lives, but she doesn’t get to just push Yaz around, so she grips the Doctor’s jaw forcefully and then—

The TARDIS, apparently done with the Doctor and Yaz’ shit, makes one enormous, rolling _bronc_ and the Doctor pulls away from Yaz with a frustrated growl.

“Right. Flying first—this later,” she indicates Yaz with a flourish, before rushing to the console and handling the controls almost aggressively—with more intensity that Yaz has ever seen her exude.

Yaz thinks, wildly, that she ought to be reaching for a handhold, probably—something with which to steady herself—but even if the TARDIS weren’t bucking and rolling beneath her then her world would still be spinning so what would be the point?

And then—they land. There is a small fire that has sprung up on the console, and Yaz can smell the smoke but she’s still so far away, her mind reeling—distantly, she sees the Doctor sort of flapping and flailing her hands ineffectually at it, but she’s still replaying that kiss, _that kiss_ , over and over in her mind and the panic she’s expecting hasn’t set in yet but she thinks it might soon---

And then the blast of a fire extinguisher brings her crashing back to reality. Ryan’s wielding one of those red ones you find in schools and shops and things (why does the Doctor has an ordinary earth fire extinguisher? Do aliens even have fire extinguishers?) and her limbs finally unfreeze.

The fire is out, then, but nobody is moving. The Doctor still stands over her console, but she isn’t looking at Yaz—to be fair, she isn’t looking at anybody—and she can feel anxiety writhing in her stomach, the same question running through her mind: _did she really mean it?_

Graham is on the floor, breathing hard and watching all of them with a tired, or exasperated, or perhaps just frightened expression, and Ryan is still holding the fire extinguisher, but loosely, as though he has forgotten he is holding it in the first place.

“That went… well,” it is Ryan who breaks the silence.

“Yeah,” the Doctor agrees absentmindedly, though she has a stupid-adorable grin on her face. She straightens with an air of decisiveness, and locks gazes with Yaz, who gulps because there’s nothing else to do under the strength of that gaze.

“Boys, do you mind?” She turns suddenly to Graham and Ryan, who have been watching open-mouthed.

“I suppose we’ll just—er—” Graham begins, but obviously hadn’t planned out what he was going to say as he trails off, unsure.

“Right,” Ryan covers him. “We have—er, a thing.”

“Very important thing.”

“Super important—er, very-top-secret thing.”

“Super hush-hush,” Graham nods wisely. “Need-to-know basis only.”

“So we’ll, er—we’ll just be off then. To do the thing.”

Yaz tears her eyes from the Doctor to watch them leave with something approaching trepidation. When she and the Doctor are finally alone, the console room feels like it suddenly became a thousand times smaller.

“Yasmin.” She looks up at the sound of her name. The Doctor is watching her again.

“Um—yeah?”

“I don’t mean to point out the obvious, but—”

“I have a feeling you’re going to,” Yaz mutters, not intending for the Doctor to hear it, but she laughs anyway.

“Yeah. Um, well—you _kissed_ me.”

Yaz feels her face grow hot. “Yeah?” she hadn’t meant to phrase it as a question, but it became one nonetheless.

The Doctor smiles, and Yaz thinks there might be a little melancholy in there. “Why did you do that?”

That’s… not what she expected to hear. “What?”

“I mean—why _me_? Did you mean to do it? I understand there was a lot of adrenaline and—”

“Doctor, I think I like you.” Yaz interrupts the Doctor before she can get too carried away in whatever spiel she had prepared, and the Doctor silences abruptly, her mouth falling open.

“Oh my God, _why_?”

Yaz laughs, then, and can’t remember why she was ever nervous about this in the first place. Why would she feel anxious about the Doctor?

“Well…” she takes a step towards the Doctor, _her_ Doctor. “You’re cleverer than anybody I’ve ever met, but you still treat us like we matter, like our _opinions_ matter. You fly the TARDIS like a maniac and yet we’ve always ended up exactly where we needed to be. You make a _great_ cup of coffee. And my mum likes you.”

The Doctor is looking at her now like she’s never seen Yasmin before, like she’s the most amazing sight there ever was.

“I mean…” the Doctor begins to respond, and scrunches her nose at Yaz. “You don’t need to compliment my frankly abysmal TARDIS piloting skills; I swear I used to be good at it! It’s just everything’s so different now, and all the interfaces are _totally_ different, and, well, my legs used to be longer and when both of my hands were doing stuff and I had to hit a button or something I could just cock a leg up or something but now that’s _completely_ out of the question and—”

“Doctor,” Yaz interrupts the spiel, shoving her hands into her pockets to keep herself from reaching out for her.

“Sorry.” The Doctor gives her a sheepish smile. “I’ve noticed that I tend to… well, go off on one.”

A beat.

“Well, I think I’ll just—erm—” Yasmin feels her courage slowly slipping away from her; she wants to run away and hide. She’s just bared her soul for the Doctor, and in return she gets—well, _nothing_. She turns to leave.

“I like you too, Yasmin Khan,” the Doctor says softly, and Yaz freezes in her tracks. She turns, disbelieving, only to see the Doctor standing there, hands in her pockets, avoiding her eyes. Just the Doctor. Just _her_ Doctor. Not some—some ancient hero, who’s had volumes written about her, nor some legendary warrior. Just the Doctor, in the TARDIS, wearing mad clothes and saying brilliant, impossible things. Just her.

And so Yasmin decides to be brave. She’d been brave earlier, she thinks, when she had taken the Doctor’s face in her hands and kissed her soundly, but now she knows she has to be brave again. She could be brave; she was a police officer—being brave was pretty much in the job description. _And_ she’d been running around doing mad things with the Doctor for weeks now; even though it was a job, you couldn’t run around with the Doctor if you didn’t have at least a _little_ bit of courage.

So she grasps that courage now, with both hands, and holds it tight to her as she closes the space between herself and the Doctor with several measured steps, and presses their lips together.

It is every bit as wonderful as it had been before, except this time there wasn’t the overhanging threat of imminent death that had really quite suddenly been averted and so now she could properly concentrate on it.

She finds her hands settling on the Doctor’s waist; feels the Doctor’s hips flare beneath her fingers; feels the Doctor shiver, just ever so slightly, as she tucks just the pads of her littlest-and-pinky finger inside the waistband of the Doctor’s trousers.

She feels as the Doctor kisses her back; brings her hand up to Yaz’ face, softly stroking her cheekbone as their lips move together, causing supernovae to burst into existence and black holes to collide with one another in great cosmic events spanning entire universes.

She feels the Doctor clasp her arms loosely around Yaz’ neck, settling her arms on Yaz’ shoulders and letting them rest there: comfortable, confident.

Eventually, Yasmin runs out of air, and she has to pull away. Only the barest amount; only enough for her to breathe deeply, feeling the Doctor smile against her mouth; feeling the Doctor’s breath against her cheek.

“Doc!”

They jump apart; Yaz thinks she might have accidentally bitten the Doctor’s lip when she was startled, though she’s currently focusing on _not dying of heart attack_ as she tries to control her breathing.

“Oops—er sorry. Should I come back?”

It’s Graham. Of _course_ it’s Graham. Why wouldn’t it be Graham?

“No, you’re alright—what’s up?” the Doctor is doing a good job of acting totally normal, Yaz thinks, though she’s still sort of bent over, pressing her hands to her face and sort of shaking slightly.

“That bloody—wait, what happened to your lip?” _Oops_.

Yasmin looks up—and yes, sure enough, the Doctor’s lip is bleeding. So she _did_ bite her. Oh dear.

“Oh, er—” the Doctor shoots Yasmin a desperate glance—evidently she doesn’t know what to say either. Graham, however, is no idiot; he looks between the two of them with a raised brow and evidently clocks on when his eyes widen slightly and he lets out a long breath.

“ _Anyway._ Doc, your kettle has sort of… monopolised the kitchen, a bit. Me and Ryan could do with your help.”

Yasmin snorts. Of course it’s the kettle.

Cockblocked by a _kettle_. That’s one to tell the grandkids.

“ _Guys!_ How many times do I have to tell you—oh, never mind. I’m coming,” the Doctor huffs, shoots Yaz a guilty glance, before going to rescue Ryan from a psychopathic kettle.

Just another day in the TARDIS _,_ Yaz thinks to herself, smiling. Never a dull moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, yes, there is another chapter after this one, but it is an EPILOGUE and it is SHORT. Will be uploaded either tonight or tomorrow.


	4. Chapter 4

The universe is huge. And full of mad, impossible things.

And sometimes, you get to keep one of these mad, impossible things for your very own.

Yasmin Khan had never imagined she would ever find herself falling among the stars, a million miles from home and never _quite_ in the right time zone. She never imagined, that day when she’d proven everybody wrong on that firing range _so long ago_ , that she’d ever see such sights as these.

The Fifth Ring of Denzabaar is inhabited by one million species, all of them living and laughing together across the whole span of the disk, all of them drinking from the one hundred thousand rivers that snake across the map like capillaries of some great body.

And all of these rivers converge at the very centre of the ring; “one thousand waterfalls, all crashing together into this enormous—dish, sort of. And they _say_ , that if you sit in just the right spot overlooking the Falls of Denzabaar at just the right time of day, then you’ll see a million, billion rainbows,” the Doctor had excitedly explained to them.

The Fields of Denzabaar were strictly forbidden to walk upon; a conservation project, the Doctor had said, trying to encourage the native populations of fauna to return—their numbers had been diminished by all of the tourism, apparently.

Which meant they had the place all to themselves.

The Doctor had flown the TARDIS with absolute precision to an outcropping above the Falls, and they’d had lunch.

“Y’know, you wouldn’t think Cornish Pasties1 are a universal thing,” Ryan had remarked while flicking crumbs into the torrential waters below.

“Nor champagne2,” Graham added, hefting the bottle and admiring the way the light danced through the effervescence.

Yasmin didn’t respond. She was too busy looking at the most beautiful sight in the known universe.

And then the Doctor turned, almost as though she’d felt Yasmin watching her, and grinned broadly.

Mad, impossible thing.

Yaz made her way over to her, carefully picking her way across the spray-soaked grass—where they had been sitting eating was completely dry, owing to the fact that the spray never _quite_ reaching all the way up the there (Yaz was fairly certain the Doctor had totally had something to do with that); here? Not so much. And one slip could cost your life.

The Doctor had turned back to watch the Falls with the same childish wonder and glee that she watched every amazing thing. Yaz reached her side—or rather, reached just slightly behind her, as the Doctor was standing perilously on the very edge of their outcropping—literally, _right_ on the very edge; on the edge enough to be giving Yasmin heart palpitations—as the Doctor was standing just a few inches below Yaz, putting them at the same height.

“Why do they call it the Fifth Ring if it’s the one in the middle? And it’s not really a ring, is it?” Yaz remarked out loud. The Doctor’s shoulders trembled, as though she was laughing—but laughing silently.

“You always ask the most poignant questions, Yaz,” the Doctor said fondly, turning and wrapping her arms around Yasmin in a loose hold. “When the first settlers came here, they reached the outermost ring first, and just named them in as they went along,” she explained then, drawing Yaz into an embrace.

Yaz melted into the contact. She still wasn’t quite used to being able to touch the Doctor _whenever she wanted_ , but she thought she’d be able to get there.

She kissed her, then, just because she could, and the Doctor made a please sound in her throat as she kissed her back.

They broke apart when a particularly forceful spray crashed against the outcropping, thoroughly drenching them both, and then they were laughing, clinging to one another to try to stop from slipping and plunging into the tumultuous waters below.

“Doctor! _Doctor!_ ” Graham was yelling, and there was a sort of high-pitched shrieking—which Yaz identified as Ryan after just a moment.

They flashed an alarmed look at one another.

“Better go see what’s happened,” the Doctor said slowly, and then the alarmed look dissolved into fierce grins and the Doctor launched herself back the way they’d come, with Yasmin following her mad, impossible thing close behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much to everybody who gave kudos and comments!!! I love all of you so very much :)
> 
> If you want to talk to me/cry about DW with me, feel free to come shoot me a message on the hell-site itself at the same name


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